ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to find out how the Norwegian mission negotiated their literacy work with the political powers in colonial and newly independent Madagascar. It focuses on the period from 1920 to 1929 which is called the mid-colonisation period. The chapter describes the political educational context in which the Norwegian mission operated their physical and institutional literacy spaces. It discusses the resources that were used in the mission’s literacy work and which children and youth that had access to the mission’s literacy programmes. The chapter examines the missions’ lobbying work for more flexible and predictable regulations of their institutions for literacy work. It explores the literacies that the mission promoted through different educational institutions during the 1920s. The most important characteristic of the public educational structures in Madagascar during the colonial period was the division between what the colonial administration called European and indigenous education.
